DOJ pays $4M a year to read public court documents

The federal court system charged the Department of Justice more than $4 million in 2009 for access to its electronic court filing system, which is composed entirely of documents in the public domain. That's according to government documents made public through a Freedom of Information Act request by open government advocate Carl Malamud (pictured right). Malamud sought the information to prove that an open source repository of U.S. legal materials -- a project called Law.gov -- could eventually save the government a billion dollars.

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